Center of Digital Archeology workers Connor Rowe (left) and Michael Ashley adjust the camera settings on a Gigapan mount to make a panoramic image of the renovation of the Officer's Club in the Presidio on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif.

The Gigapan mount incrementally moves as the camera takes over a thousand images which combine to make a panoramic image of the renovation of the Officer's Club in the Presidio on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 in San Francisco, Calif.

Michael Ashley and his team are capturing a rare glimpse of history from every imaginable angle.

As construction crews conduct extensive renovations of the Presidio Officers' Club, one of the oldest buildings in San Francisco, they're uncovering adobe not seen for more than a century.

The walls might have been part of a Spanish fort built as early as the 1770s. They were incorporated into the original officers' club around 1847 and further obscured behind lath and plaster in the 1930s, according to the National Park Service.

Ashley, chief technology officer at the Center for Digital Archaeology at UC Berkeley, is overseeing efforts to preserve this peek back into time in as sharp a detail as possible. Using a robotic system known as the GigaPan and other tools, Ashley and his colleagues are capturing enormous panoramic views of the site, time lapse imagery of the renovation and ultra-high-resolution, 3-D photos of the walls.

It's work that would have been technically impossible just a few years ago. Now it can be done with basic cameras on a device that costs less than $900.

"It's game changing," Ashley said. "It's a great time to be alive if you're a photographer."

Indeed, photography and videography are in the midst of a digital revolution that is redefining the field.

New tools are democratizing standard photography, making it increasingly easy for even the shaky handed to capture usable images. But technology is also delivering devices and software that are enabling serious hobbyists and pros to stretch the very boundaries of the art form.

Bay Area companies

Not surprisingly, many of these game-changing toys are being developed, in part or entirely, around the Bay Area.

-- The GigaPan was created by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center and some help from its Mountain View neighbor Google. Essentially, it's a robotic system that automatically moves and triggers a camera, enabling it to take hundreds (or more) of separate pictures in a near-perfect grid.

The software can then stitch the stills together, creating a massive panoramic image of, say, a filled stadium that can zoom down to the features of a single face.

The Center for Digital Archaeology is going a few steps further. It is creating super-high-resolution, 3-D images by taking two sets of GigaPans from slightly different perspectives. They're also repeating the GigaPan process over time to create highly detailed time-lapse imagery.

-- Adobe Systems of San Jose has been showing off an experimental "deblurring" technology that can analyze the path a camera took during a shot to reassemble fuzzy images into sharp ones. Among the examples posted online is renowned combat photographer Robert Capa's iconic image of an American soldier arriving on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Capa famously lost most of his pictures from that historic moment when a darkroom assistant accidentally melted rolls of negatives. The few frames that survived rank among his best-known images, even though, as Life Magazine noted in its captions, they were "slightly out of focus."

That's considerably less the case after running them through the Adobe algorithm. While restoring a piece of history is a wonderful application of the technology, the far more common one will surely be to give today's photographers a much wider margin for error.

Adobe hasn't said when, or even if, this feature will be released, but many expect - or maybe the word is hope - it will arrive in the next version of its Photoshop software.

Industry watchers say the announcements represent another step forward in the ability to capture cinematic images on digital cameras, at a price far below a traditional film crew (which is not to say they're cheap). In fact, in some ways the digital images are far superior to what could ever be captured on film - enabling, for example, super sharp frames even at ultra-slow motion.

-- On the other end of the spectrum, smart phones are equipped with increasingly high-quality photo and video cameras, as well as improved editing tools.

Apple's just-released iPhone 4S features an 8-megapixel camera with a much improved lens, along with software that allows easy cropping, red-eye removal and other image enhancements.

Apps for sharing

Meanwhile, photo-sharing apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic are all the rage, in part because they allow users to easily apply filters that warm up the tones in images.

Some professional photographers are understandably rankled by certain trends. Editing, filtering and developing techniques that took years to learn can now be done in seconds on a smart phone. And it can just seem like plain cheating when unfocused pictures are magically rendered sharp.